


et nos autem carnes

by mercurien



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Catholicism, Cemeteries, Gen, I have no idea how to describe this other than "Les Mis Really Wasn't Morbid Enough For Me", The complicated legacy of the French Revolution, Vaguely classical veneration-of-the-dead-hero themes, and other things that were bad for the Parisian mortality rate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 17:58:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5549984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercurien/pseuds/mercurien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"But what is left of the insurrection of 1832, when the gore has been scraped off the cobbles? What is left, when the cobbles themselves are ploughed up, the city reshaped? You may as well ask: what is left of a human being when the soul and the body go their separate ways; when the flesh becomes meat, and decays under those elements to which it is newly subject?" </p><p>Seven lessons in (im)mortality. </p><p>(Content warnings for gore/body horror but not quite enough to merit the "Graphic depictions of violence" label)</p>
            </blockquote>





	et nos autem carnes

**Author's Note:**

> I found this in my drafts from the summer before last, and decided to tidy it up a bit and post it, but honestly I can't really work out what past me was trying to write; have some preemptive apologies!

 

 

 

 

 

> “ _Then he said unto me, Son of man, these are the men that devise mischief, and give wicked counsel in this city: Which say, It is not near; let us build houses: This city is the cauldron, and we be the flesh_.”  
>  — Ezekiel, 11:2-3

 

 

i. 

Like any other history, you know how this ends: with the bodies. With the steadily retreating columns of smoke, in dense Parisian streets that are no longer there.

It ends with the blood discolouring the clay of the street. It ends with the earth shovelled by aching arms over the bodies. It ends in the percolation of ink, gradually, from the papers, to the poetry, to the pages of history.

But what is left of the insurrection of 1832, when the gore has been scraped off the cobbles? What is left, when the cobbles themselves are ploughed up, the city reshaped? You may as well ask: what is left of a human being when the soul and the body go their separate ways; when the flesh becomes meat, and decays under those elements to which it is newly subject?

You know how this ends. But every history must have a beginning.

 

 

ii. 

It was at some time during the long, slow death-rattle of the _ancien régime_ that certain curious phenomena began to make themselves known in the vicinity of the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents in Les Halles. This cemetery had served the city as a depository of its corpses for about six hundred years; a sprawling subterranean accumulation of bones, of the weathered sepulchres of forgotten families, of plague pits and charnel houses piled with generations of cracked crania, ornated picturesquely with a mural of the danse macabre: the Dance of Death.

Nobody knew how many people were contained within the cemetery’s walls; over the centuries it had received the dead of twenty-two parishes of Paris, the lost causes of the Hôtel Dieu and the wreckage of a hundred epidemics. Estimates were placed at around two million. The exhalations that emanated from decomposing corpses would filter into the cellars of the surrounding houses in Les Halles, so heavily they were known to extinguish tallow candles. In May 1780, the cellar walls of a house in the rue de la Lingerie gave way beneath the weight of the thousands of corpses contained in the adjacent mass grave.

Les Innocents was unhealthy, unreasonable, and decidedly unfashionable. For this was the Age of Enlightened Man, and Enlightened Man never wasted an opportunity to demonstrate the implacability of human Reason in eradicating risks to public health or ghastly objects of superstition. Enlightened Man, the heirs of Diderot and his ilk, needed a lineage based not on flesh and blood, but on thought. The cemetery was closed until further arrangements could be made; these in turn were postponed as the municipal and ecclesiastical authorities of the City of Paris were at a loss for what further arrangement could possibly made for the two million dead Parisians. They argued about it for two years until an anonymous pamphlet, published in London in 1782, politely recommended a solution. The unknown author, inspired by the Necropoli of Antiquity, proposed the construction of an ossuary beneath the city. They recommended coating the corpses in resin to slow putrefaction, and installing an embalming workshop underground where the temperature would conserve the bodies, as had been observed in the catacombs at Palermo.

This plan was judged to be sound enough, and without further ado the Lieutenant-General Alexandre Lenoir, who was prefect of police at this time, began to organise the transportation of bones from les Innocents to the underground caverns of Tombe-Issoire, beyond the Barrière d’Enfer in the south of the capital. A decision of the Council of State of 9th November 1785 ordered the evacuation of the bones and the refurbishment of Les Innocents into a public market square. The king thought it a very good solution, very healthy, very rational, and like most other men of the age he would like to be guided by Reason, instead of his ever-fraying nerves. Within a handful of decades, when death was making a prolonged sojourn in Paris, other cemeteries in the capital were scrambling to empty themselves, deposit the remains further beneath the ground, further out of sight. What power will the dead have over us, once we can no longer see them?

Of course, not all of the corpses excavated were neat and clean collected skeletons; in many of the mass graves decomposition had been incomplete, and piles of human flesh had turned into fat.

This fat was collected, and provided for the cheap manufacture of candles and soap.

 

 

iii. 

Enjolras, mid-harangue: the vein that strikes sinuously up the side of the throat stands out blueishly against the skin. The throat is bursting with blood and noise; to the sound of the heartbeat they riot amid arteries and tendons like the crowds; when violence breaks out at these gatherings, Enjolras thinks, it is not man against man but principal against principle; they are breathing the sweat-smelling wind of pure thought.

He lets himself believe this.

The sun is at his side and passes a heavy hand across his face, the golden collapse of hair. The street is crowded with the people, its air is crowded with their voices, of which that of Enjolras is the loudest, the prevailing roar of crisp and violent rhetoric. He says the state of the nation is insupportable; the body politic is diseased. The man Charles, he says, is not a king; the last king fell in ‘92, they are making the corpses dance on puppets’ strings. And he, Enjolras, is living flesh; surrounded by the breathing bodies of his friends, he stands atop something we cannot see and the crowd can make him out by the gilt shine of his head and the solid crimson of his coat; there is the coat, the fragile barrier of gilet and shirt, the skin, the ribs, then the cavity where the pink tissue of lung expands.

In 1835, when this is all over, Georg Büchner writes,  _The Revolution, like Saturn, devours her own children_. 

 

 

iv. 

In the October of 1830, Grantaire makes an impromptu call at the rooms of Jean Prouvaire and finds the door unlocked. Grantaire presumes to intrude and, in a _tableau_ of comic self-parody, finds their tenant elongated on the moth-desecrated récamier like an artist’s model, a human skull held in one elegantly outstretched hand. He regards it vis-à-vis, like Hamlet, from the perch of his own cupped fingerbones; he wears a faded crimson banyan and the grease and dust of a few days' self-neglect; upon noticing Grantaire’s entrance he speaks without preamble. 

“Would you paint me, in this manner? Thus if I were to die young it would serve as posterity’s portrait of me, would it not?” 

None of this is uncharacteristic of Jean Prouvaire; most of his friends are no longer moved by his theatricalities. Death is his most recent object of contemplation, having germinated in the grave-soil of the men they buried at the start of August; the glorious dead of the _Trois Glorieuses_. Grantaire had helped with the republican funereal rites; he had thought once his friends had buried the men who had died for their ideals and the other men who had simply got in the way, there might be an end to it. As usual, he was wrong.

“Do not ask me to hasten your tragic downfall, my dear,” says Grantaire as he sits. “Neither can you expect me to take up the venerable mantle of First Disciple to the Cult of Jean Prouvaire. I have not the faith.”

“Not for me, perhaps,” says Jean Prouvaire, with a sigh.

“I should only paint you in a morbid pose if you were dying. Any other arrangement would be an offense to artistic truth.”

“If I die this winter, you ought to make my death mask,” says Prouvaire. “Do not contradict me. There are epidemics; there are violent crimes; there are fantastical accidents - Acts of God. These things are possible. We know not the hour. Nor the means.”

Jean Prouvaire likes dead poets. Along his shelves he keeps volumes of Gilbert, Malifâtre, Chénier - even Chatterton, though he cannot read English. Grantaire does not worry about his friend’s immortal longings; there may be danger in wanting to die, but none whatsoever in wanting to be a dead poet. Presently the dead poet sits up, crosses his legs and nests the skull between his knees, to face his visitor.

“Who’s your friend? Did you at last prevail upon Joly to procure you a whole human skeleton?”

“He remains stubborn with me! No, a mine overseer of my acquaintance let me into the catacombs; I stole it.”

“Jesus.”

“No, no, I do not believe it is,” says the terminally literal-minded Prouvaire. He takes the skull up in his hands once more; his fingertips explore the spaces where unknown elements gnawed away at the jawbone. “Although I admit I could not be certain - what _did_ happen to the body of Christ, after the crucifixion?”

“We are given to believe he was interred and rose again upon the third day,” Grantaine intones.

“No, I mean, _after_ that? The body is quite surplus to requirements for celestial ascension; what happened to it?”

“Unless transubstantiation was thrown out since I last visited my mother, we cannibalise Christ on Sundays; we drink his blood. We serve it in wafer slices to make him go further; the wine is watered down. Hence my disdain for God; I am too seasoned a drunkard to become intoxicated by Christ’s blood. And on the subject of my cynic’s temperament, I am compelled to believe your skull - the one in your hands, I should say - to be that of some very inconsequential personage; a cobbler, a cuckold, a pious man, died in his fourtieth year of a fever.”

“No man is greater or lesser than another when he is in the ground," says Jean Prouvaire. For a while he reflects on what he has just said with a dissatisfied frown, as if there could have been some less direct and more poetical way of saying it.

"After the Restoration," he continues, after some time, "you know, the old mass graves from ‘93 and ‘94 were excavated, in search of Louis Capet’s bones. The rest were moved to the catacombs. Along with the rest - does it not interest you, Grantaire, that almost anyone who has ever made a mark upon the history of this city is down there? Molière is there, Corneille, Racine; the revolutionists - the Brissotins, the Enragés, the Indulgents, the Robespierrists. Lavoisier is there. Chénier. And nobody has the faintest idea who is who, the politicians and aristocrats and poets piled up with market women and cabinet-makers. The flesh is the same, Grantaire; the body imports nothing - it is the  _spirit_ which will determine everything, for when we are all bones nobody will know whether we were tyrant or slave." 

"You sound like Enjolras," says Grantaire. 

"We are surrounded by the dead." Jean Prouvaire places his stolen skull upon the low table before the chaise; he takes his own by its jawbone between his hands and adopts another pose of contemplation. "They are in the quarries around the city; they are beneath our feet. We tread on bones. Our forefathers gave us our  _liberty_ , and we give them the souls of our feet. Our knees, and backs." 

"Thus is a martyr. Here are my ideals, here is my body and soul stretched out; the whore and the mattress of corpses." 

Jehan wrinkles his nose. "Don't be vulgar about serious matters."

"All serious matters are vulgar - sickness, money; love, death." 

 

 

v. 

Through the long winter and sudden spring of 1831, Combeferre is at the Hôtel Dieu. A young novelist sees the city of Paris, in his mind’s eye, as if from the clouds; he sees the towers of a thousand churches tremble as one. At Saint-Valentin, churches are ransacked by protesters; in March republicans march on the Palais-Royal. Combeferre sees legs broken by carts, eyes half-blinded by years of needlework by candlelight, bellies swollen with the noxious humours engendered in the moist spring air. He sees corpses beyond number taken out with stained coverings drawn over them like curtains: here you are, the show is finished, you must now exit the theatre.

In May there is a Bonapartist demonstration; in July it is a year since those three glorious, terrible days and Enjolras has the solemn aspect of a man in mourning. He neglects his health; barely sleeps, eats infrequently. Combeferre tries to advise him to rest and Enjolras writes a polemical pamphlet that nobody in Paris wants to publish, quoting extensively from the speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just as recorded in the yellowing Moniteurs in the library. Prouvaire is anxious for him. Combeferre merely says the cause consumes him; Combeferre who is precise and economical with his words. Jehan with his poet's instincts can split open a phrase as his medical friend can split open a body and extract its organs, the way a botanist can coax open the bud of a flower into a broad fan of bright petals. He imagines skeletal hands grasping for the tails of Enjolras's coat; the men swallowed up by the Parisian soil in '94 taking their revenge. History snaps at his heels, and he will walk smiling into its jaws. 

The Society of the Friends of the ABC organises; Enjolras and his lieutenants work into the hot yawning nights of the summer of 1831 over numbers, diagrams, ciphers. The summer is quiet, relatively. Courfeyrac has a new mistress, he reverently carries her lilac scent about his person, wears his cravat loose in the stagnant heat. Then the winter sees the rising at Lyon, quickly crushed, and nobody is surprised. Enjolras believes the revolution must begin in the capital, as if the revolution were some patriotic enterprise which, Grantaire supposes, is precisely how Enjolras sees the situation. As we enter 1832, life expectancy in France is almost thirty-six years. Twelve months from now, we will all be dead.

 

 

 

vi. 

Ask Enjolras if he really wants to die for his principles, his country - and Grantaire does, frequently - and he'll say he is prepared to give his life in service of the French Republic; a state that has not existed since 18 Brumaire.

He will say that there are many different ways of giving your life to something; not all of them involve imminent death. If death is always-non negotiable then, it is more a question of how long you are prepared to live.

This is the answer; this is what Enjolras means. It never answers the question. If death is unknown and unknowable, Grantaire thinks, then perhaps it is not a question at all. It is not a question of death but after-death, what happens if and when your promised terrestrial paradise comes, if it will ever come. Enjolras must fear that. Like Jehan with his poets, Enjolras would not like to die, but to have lived: to have been one of his heroes who are now lost somewhere beneath layers of Parisian clay; whose lives and reputations are nonetheless exhumed and furiously rewritten, venerated, denigrated - because when you're dug up, they cannot tell whether you were tyrant or slave, monster or martyr. The church of Jean-Jacques and his apostles offers no other promise of afterlife, and exacts terrible devotions. Die violently, die young, bequeath everything you have to the ground, and let posterity beat each other to death with your bones.  

 

 

vii. 

There are no pacts between lions and men; Enjolras thinks his only gift was to choose the thing that kills him and eats him raw. You cannot bargain with death, you cannot make terms with history, but you can choose the name on your lips when you stand facing the guns. The laws of progress, inexorable as the laws of physics, will drive the world ceaselessly towards the day when our lives will be our own. And he thinks, there will be a day when he stands in the dwindling light with the flag heavy in his hand, balanced on a mountain of debris, and there will be a day, after we are all dead and our bodies have turned into other things, people who have not yet been born will collect the fragments of what we are, what we were, and they will turn us into myths, into shadows, into gods. 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Paris's subterranean world is fairly well-documented; histories of the catacombs and the destruction of the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents are quite easy to find. The 1782 pamphlet "Projet de catacombes pour la Ville de Paris" is on Google Books somewhere. There was also this really interesting essay by Christine Métayer about the role the cemetery played in the development of the Les Halles community but that, uh, has nothing to do with this (yeah, look at me channelling the spirit of Victor Hugo).The role of the catacombs in this is mostly inspired by Andrew Miller's 2011 novel "Pure".  
> 2\. I have seen that Büchner quote attributed to Vergniaud, but Büchner is the earliest reliable sources I can find for it; feel free to correct me!  
> 3\. I can't remember the exacting wording of the quote that Grantaire references with his mattress metaphor, but it's most commonly attributed as Mirabeau re: liberty.  
> 4\. The young novelist referred to at the start of 1831 is, of course, Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris, the "Paris à vol d'oiseau" chapter. There's also a "Paris à vol de hibou" chapter in the Saint-Denis volume of Les Misérables. The guy loved his birds eye views of Paris.


End file.
